1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image processing device, information management device, information management system, and information management method, and particularly, to an image processing device including an image reading unit, an image storage unit, and a printing unit, and a relevant information management device, information management system, and information management method.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years and continuing, functions of a printer, a copier, a scanner, a facsimile machine, and others are incorporated into the same housing, and realize an image forming device known as a multi-function peripheral. The multi-function peripheral, although suffering from a severe limitation of memory capacity, has a central processing unit (CPU), just like a general purpose computer, and realizes the above various functions by software application control.
For example, Japanese Laid-Open Patent Application No. 2005-51308 (hereinafter, referred to as “reference 1”) discloses an image forming device which has the document management function, and stores image data read when the copier or scanner function is used in a hard disk drive (HDD) of the image forming device.
The image data (documents) stored in the image forming device can be collectively displayed on an operations panel or a client personal computer (PC) through a network, and from the list of the image data a desired document can be selected.
However, in the related art, the documents managed by the image forming device are only documents read by the image forming device. Thus, when there are plural image forming devices each having the document management function in an office, a user has to access each of the image forming devices to print the desired document, and this is not convenient.